Analysis of Early Childhood Development (ECD) facilities within the city of Cape Town

Abstract

The accessibility mapping of Early Childhood Development (ECD) facilities within the City of Cape Town is part of a larger accessibility audit and facility planning exercise for a range of community social services undertaken by CSIR for the City of Cape Town and begun in 2009. The project as a whole sought to model and analyze current and future facility provision in terms of accessibility, location and sufficiency through service access planning. In 2011, CSIR undertook analyses for the City of Cape Town with regard to its ECD facilities by identifying those areas where the supply and demand for facilities was not balanced in terms of agreed service provision standards and for the current population distribution. This was achieved by an audit of the current situation of accessibility of ECD facilities in Cape Town in respect of both location and size. This was followed by modelling of the optimal location of a select number of new ECD Centre’s of Excellence facilities to meet the backlog in current demand and accommodate future growth. The analysis was done using the customized Geographical Information System software known as Flowmap. The results of the analysis produced outputs of demand (population distribution), service coverage (served/unserved population), travel time maps and optimized locations of proposed facilities. In addition, results indicate that the majority of the City’s children (age 0-6 years) can reach an ECD facility within a travel distance of 2km, which is the maximum acceptable travel distance from most household, except for a few in the rural areas. However, when the capacities of ECD facilities are taken into consideration, there are several areas with high densities of unserved population, especially for the youngest children aged 0-4 years.